Since I've just returned from India, I thought I'd re-post this. For lack of time--with barely a day in Pune-- I didn't visit the German Bakery. And I heard that the old staff had left; that it was completely changed. And so it has (link to photo at the end).
So here are my memories, in honor of the Class of 2005 and Class of 2006 MUWCI reunion, 2015.
It was neither German nor bakery, according to the German students at Mahindra United World College of India, an international high school where I worked from 2003 - 2006. Usually one sweet shop in any larger Indian city was named “German Bakery,” a moniker which was infallible bait for dazed, sensory-overloaded, stomach-weary Western tourists.
Westerners don’t have a corner on the bread market. The taxonomy of Indian breads, with their myriad of flours and techniques of production and shapes and textures, gives the pain au levain and the ciabatta and the bagel a run for their money. Our Indian faculty colleagues patiently explained the differences between parathas and naans and papadums and rotis, many times, with a pride and reverence that I admired. I can’t say that I ever remembered how each bread was made, or which type of flour was used. Those were details I could not assimilate without making the breads myself, which I never tried. The different types of pans needed, let alone the ingredients and the techniques and the ovens required, were all in the category of Not Enough Available Time or Brain Space given my job. I just ate the garlic naan, the cheese naan, the papadums and the rotis gratefully, and liked them all. I’m sure my Indian students and colleagues possess bread memories every bit as firmly implanted in the pits of their stomachs and as deep in their brains as Westerners do. Their bread memories just smell very different.
The first savvy Indian or Nepali who named his shop a German bakery would be a millionaire if he’d patented the idea, understanding that the connotations of “German” attached to “bakery” would hit the inner expat button of every Westerner who walked by. The German Bakery in Pune was no different; in fact, it must have been among the most successful in its genre, and maybe the most international. Pune’s German bakery was, it seems, named by a German. It had been owned by a local Indian family, though, and had been managed all those years by a Nepali man. He hired a crew of Nepalis who kept the restaurant open eighteen hours a day, seven days a week.
The German Bakery looked more like a big love shack from Gilligan’s Island than a tidy confiserie in Munich. The outside walls were a solid green box, roof and all, with a couple of palm trees outside and a small door cut out of the box in the front. Directly in front of the door, past a small seating area, was the counter for ordering food, with the busy kitchen behind. To the right side of the entrance, a large, dusky room lined with picnic tables beckoned to smokers of all types and provided room for larger groups to spread out.
The Bakery was located adjacent to the leafy, manicured grounds of the Osho Ashram, the headquarters of the Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh (Osho) who had infamously run a huge operation in Oregon in the 1980s and was eventually expelled from the US for immigration violations. The ashram in Pune is, officially, an internationally known center for meditation, a tranquil refuge for re-orienting oneself. Unofficially it was, we heard, a haven for meditation blended with sex: anyone checking in to Osho was first required to have an HIV test, on the spot, with of course a negative result. I never tried Osho myself, although Osho’s reputation for sexual freedom was confirmed by an Iranian woman I met who had stayed there with her mother, disappointed with its component of the physical along with the quasi-spiritual. To be fair, others I knew had stayed there and found the simple calm and beautiful grounds an essential respite. Nevertheless, as three years at the remote mountaintop school wore on, a few of my single colleagues and I came to bemoan our lack of sex with vows that we’d check into Osho for a weekend (separately) if we really couldn’t take the isolation any more. Visions of a weekend of plentiful and mysterious liaisons in small white rooms with European beatnik strangers behind those tree-lined Osho walls often flashed before my eyes as I lay alone in my huge double bed on the mountaintop.
But a Saturday-morning visit to the German Bakery always brought me back to reality. While chatting with friends, I’d scan the red-robed-clad Osho devotees hanging out in the German Bakery, looking for anyone vaguely enticing, wondering if I would, in reality, be attracted enough to have a romp with any of these men. Inevitably the answer was No. My Scottish friend’s word for them popped into my head every time: "mingen." Mingen was the only way to describe those Aussie and German guys, heads shaved or hair too long and too dirty; bodies ridiculously tattooed or pierced or too fucked-up from traveling and drugs, or just too old. And those pretentious long red robes sealed the deal, making the men look like unwilling monks who’d been plucked from hitch-hiking into a monastery, not yet cleaned up and sobered up. The blinding light of day just outside, the hard-packed dirt floor, the come-hither coffee smells and the stale-cigarette scent under the roof of the German Bakery started my week all over again, cleansing me of the previous week’s Osho fantasies.
The bakery—really a combination bakery/restaurant/high-end grocery—was a huge success, the Haight-Ashbury of Pune. Not only did those at Osho provide a steady business; anyone wanting a place to have a cappuccino and a piece of apple tart, a mango smoothie, a pomegranate juice, homemade hummus, or an omelet with a salad that was safe to eat, flocked to the German Bakery. It was a place for something different. It was, above all, a place to watch and be watched: everyone, Indian or foreigner, who entered the Bakery wanted their coffee spiced with some vicarious pleasure as they viewed the parade of robe-clad Westerners from Osho, the ordinary white travelers, the cocky young Indian men who wore tight t-shirts and even tighter jeans or the stylish, kurta-and-jean-clad Indian women.
Our own students and faculty, an incredibly diverse bunch, were part of the regular scenery which attracted people to the German Bakery. And the all-Nepali staff only added to the restaurant’s internationalism: they had come to Pune for better jobs and working conditions. The same four small, patient, smiling guys were always behind the counter, slicing cheeses or pies or handing us the bread and drinks we’d ordered. They were probably thirty years old, or more, but must have thought this would be a work gig that would last them many years if they wanted it.
Despite what our German students said, somebody was doing some baking: many Saturdays, we’d come home with two loaves of multigrain bread, some coconut macaroons and perhaps their version of apple strudel or croissants. The pastries never achieved the exact lightness as their Western forebears; it would have been difficult to do, given the difference in the milk and flour produced in India. But they were close enough to the real thing to be soul-satisfying and sustaining—and delicious. And not cafeteria food. Going to a place every couple of weeks with a glass-fronted, three-shelved bakery counter and seeing foods I recognized, whose names I knew, reassured me that I was still who I was.
The German Bakery anchored its own little shopping mall of sorts, having spawned a travel-agent’s booth, a cigarette shop, numerous outdoor Tibetan jewelry merchants, and a couple of shops upstairs which sold the requisite hippie-traveler stuff: tie-dyed T-shirts, faux-Indian billowy wrap-around trousers for women, Asian-style flip-flops, inventive hats, more jewelry, rolling papers, cheap shawls, and cloth shoulder bags. One of the stores possessed the only bathroom in the whole compound, a disgusting affair that was nevertheless necessary; knowledge of this single bathroom was one of those bits of Pune advice the seasoned students and faculty passed on to each year’s new batch. The whole three-story building immediately behind the German Bakery seemed patched together with tape, with creaking wooden stairs and appearing from the outside as precarious as a movie set from a 1930s Hollywood Western.
It wasn’t my last time at the German Bakery, but one of the most memorable was at the end of my final March break when I got the rickshaw driver to rush me from the bus depot to the Bakery on a Sunday morning before 7 am, waiting outside until they opened their doors for the day. I had just returned on an overnight bus from the beaches of Goa, during which I’d been wedged into a reclining seat between three snoring, farting businessmen. After a couple hours of fidgeting and fighting off a panic attack from my claustrophobia, I had crawled over them and found an empty, lone seat elsewhere in the bus. It didn’t recline, so I hadn’t slept at all.
As the sun rose and the bus approached Pune, the anticipation of a couple of cappuccinos and a croissant at the German Bakery calmed me through the last hour of snores and traffic. The school’s driver couldn’t pick me up until noon, and the Bakery was the only place I could think of where I could, and wanted to, spend five early, restive hours. Getting out of the rickshaw while the air still smelled fresh, with red smearing the treetops, the late-March summer light still gentle, sitting on the curb outside and finally seeing the restaurant’s green patch of a door half-open felt like rebirth. The sleepy waiters looked surprised to see anyone at that hour; they hadn’t yet cleaned the dining room and straightened the picnic tables from a late Saturday night of Pune University students. Moving slowly, they fixed my cappuccino and sent me up to their rooftop while they cleaned. I clambered up the three flights of stairs hauling a backpack and my coffee, amazed to find a bathroom heretofore unknown, and an unkempt little rooftop deck with three small plastic tables and a few chairs. I had it all to myself, looking over the treetops and the Osho walls, above the developing bustle of the street. It was heaven.
I drank coffee and wrote in my journal until the sun was fully up and the temperature rose. At eight, I relocated to cool of the dining room, bought a Times of India and joined the shifts of mild-mannered coffee-seekers reading their newspapers; ate pastries; people-watched; dozed; bought some of their cheeses and breads for the week. At ten, I browsed at the Tibetan jewelry shop outside and experienced again the futility of bargaining with the proprietress for the red coral earrings I liked. At eleven, I bought some lovely figs at a cart in the lane outside the Bakery, from an old man who knew me from repeated visits. Laden with backpack and groceries, I spent the remaining time inside the Bakery, drinking iced mint tea as the sun baked the roof on the late-March summer morning. After that morning at the German Bakery, my previous night’s claustrophobic bus ride had faded the blessed fade of bad travel memories. In the daze-inducing heat of mid-day, I bobbed into half-sleep on the jeep ride back to campus, to face the emotional, sweltering last two months of my stay in India.
Four years later, on Saturday, February 13, 2010, a bomb exploded in an unattended “packet” in the German Bakery, as a waiter attempted to move the bag. It happened at 7:15 pm, only two hours, I’m told, after all the Mahindra UWC students and faculty had left. Seventeen people were killed, including one of the Nepali waiters (no doubt the one who found the package). Some fifty others were injured, including four of the staff. The police believe the bombing was carried out by the same organization that bombed and attacked major tourist sites in Mumbai in November 2008. As in the Mumbai bombings, many more Indians than foreigners were killed, although the targeted locations were ones frequented by foreigners.
All the German Bakery victims were students in their late teens and early twenties at the local Pune colleges. For us faculty, and apparently for most other foreigners, it was never a place we had considered hanging out in the evenings. I’m not sure why. Our students, of course, at ages sixteen to eighteen were younger than the German Bakery’s average age, and had a 5 pm return time to campus. It was logistics, perhaps, and exhaustion: we typically met our driver in a different part of town, and were eager to go home.
My Indian colleagues would surely know this better than I, but it seems as though the German Bakery had two identities. During the day, it felt like we foreigners were supposed to be there, that we were part of the parade of nations envisioned by the German Bakery’s founders, seeking a respite from whatever restraints or bewilderment we felt during the week. During the evenings, the restaurant apparently assumed another identity, reverting to those who were entitled to be there: students as well, but for the most part young people who actually came from India, who lived there, hitting the funkiest club in a college town on their Saturday night. I never saw the place at its hippest and rowdiest. For those nineteen to twenty-eight year-olds at the local Pune colleges and university, hanging out at the German Bakery in the evenings must have been like strutting down Colaba in Mumbai, to see and be seen, maybe to sneak a joint or smoke a few cigarettes they would never dare smoke anywhere else; to wear sparkly sandals and show off their newest gadgets; to talk to a guy or a girl from a different place. I imagine that big room at 7:15 pm as the sun had gone down, the decibel level unbearable with the animated, rapid-fire conversation of young adults released from six days of studying, maybe with some lights turned on so they could see each other, gesturing and laughing and flirting, these bright young adults who had been sent to Pune as their family’s best hope. The bag must have looked like any other one slung under a table, a blue-and-yellow plastic Adidas bag or a tattered dull-green messenger bag, except that there was a curious package spilling out of it.
Among the dead were two Sundanese, one Iranian and one Italian student, as well as the Nepali waiter. The other twelve killed were Indians.
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The new German Bakery
